For what it's worth, I still use a circa 2011 T420 for my work PC (decent spec for the time with i7 and 8GB RAM) which will probably be around or under your price. Great ThinkPad keyboard (non-chiclet), and instead of following the company upgrade cycle I opted for an SSD and new battery.

A lot of corporates off-load perfectly good laptops (as 'company property' they've often been taken care of reasonably well, or just left on a desk, or kept in a cupboard as backups) as part of their procurement cycle. Find such a reseller and you'll likely not only have a cheap laptop, but one with years more life in it too.

Love my T420. Bought it new, used it for work for a long time. Now it's my field laptop I take with me when flying my quadcopters. It's been dropped, rained on, sat in the sun all day when it's 100 degrees outside and it still boots up happily. Have been thinking about putting a SSD in it but I really don't need the speed and the original drive works fine.

We had a T420 for a while, they are nice machines and I think the last of that series where you can wipe the BIOS password without replacing the motherboard.

Just don't get the ?40 series, it's the series without physical trackpad buttons. You can put the ?50 trackpad in it, but that's more hassle and doesn't work in Windows well without extra reflashing.

Thankfully, they reverted to physical buttons in ?50 series and later.

I've had great luck with Thinkpad T420. I bought 2 over the last 2 years for about $225 (USD) from amazon. One of them i run linux mint without issue - my daily driver. The other one i kept with win7 (for kid as their school machine). I did replace the battery on one of them for a smaller physical size, and it apparently boosted the duration/power...so the original battery must have been aged. I can't complain because the replacement battery - again off of amazon - was around $50 (USD). Overall quite happy with T420 and would purchase theme again. (I have no experience with any other thinkpad models.) I hope this helps!

Unfortunately that generation of CPU (T420, i5-2520?) is just about the time when hardware video decoding was getting off the ground. You can play back 1080p video just barely and not always glitch-free with that CPU.

I'm not sure what the price differences are in Europe but I snagged a X230 for ~that amount in the US and am fairly happy. My only regret is the TN panel screen; this can be avoided by getting an X230T or going out of your way to find one with an IPS panel (a lot of resellers won't state what kind of panel it has, though). I got mine from a company that only refurbishes Thinkpads and was pretty happy about it, so I'd suggest looking off eBay as well and seeing if there's any companies like that where you are.

As the article suggests, you can also upgrade it along the way if your budget increases.

I've bought two machines from bluelink.nl, they're a small shop that refubrishes corporate laptops. Both machines worked great and are like new.

(Not affiliated with them, just a happy customer)

What's "the best" is obviously subjective, but you can get a decent X250 for that price.

For 200 EUR you should be able to get a decent T440. Then invest another 15EUR and buy a T450 trackpad.

You could most likely get an X220 for that amount. It has nice old non-chiclet keyboard (I like it even more than the X201 keyboard because it has big escape and delete keys) and is still plenty powerful.

I love my original X220 but it's just a bit too slow sometimes. Definitely would get one with a upgraded SSD and more RAM if you see one.

You can put an msata drive into a sata 2.5 enclosure and stick it in your laptop. There are also pata ssds from kingspec

I’ve got a T410 and a T430s. Keyboard on the 410 is way better, but I upgraded because I needed more memory and a stouter processor to do webpack compiles.

They’re kind of a pain to disassemble, but it’s doable.

T430s is a horrible design mess. there is a middle layer of magnesium and all the wires go through random holes drilled in this magnesium and if you go through the wrong hole you will never get it back together again. the fan is on the bottom of the motherboard on the bottom of the computer and it takes 12 disassembly steps and 12 reassembly steps to fix the most commonly broken part which is the fan. Die T430s, die!!!

The 520 series still has the classic keyboard. The T520 will come in under budget, but sometimes you can find deals for the W520 (my preference).

X220/X230/250